Doomsday Scenario

The CTA is back on track--sort of. With a little budget juggling, the Blagojevich administration and state Democrats have apparently found a way to bail out the transit agency, averting devastating service cuts and fare increases slated to begin mid-July. Democratic lawmakers paved the way for a new budget Sunday, sending the governor a multibillion-dollar plan to help fund state government by diverting money earmarked for state pensions. The proposal would provide state...

CTA President Forrest Claypool stood next to a photo of a nuclear mushroom cloud circled in red with a line through it and declared Monday that the transit agency is "moving beyond doomsday. " Claypool told the City Club of Chicago that CTA riders and the agency's workforce would have faced "massive cuts to service and massive layoffs" next year if the CTA hadn't introduced management reforms, cost savings in a new labor contract and fare increases affecting all types of...

As many of you might be aware, like it or not, we are all on the clock. According to various experts, the world as we know it is supposed to end in 2012. Inasmuch as 2012 is an Olympic year -- London will be host to those Summer Games and bearing the attendant debt -- you could say the parade following that track meet will redefine the meaning of Closing Ceremonies. This doomsday scenario in part is based on the ancient Mayan civilization that...

RIYADH (Reuters) - International Monetary Fund forecasts that Saudi Arabia's budget surpluses will gradually decline before dropping into deficit by 2016 are a "doomsday scenario", the kingdom's Finance Minister Ibrahim Alassaf said on Saturday. The world's top oil exporter has run large budget surpluses since 2009 but the IMF said in a report last month that falling energy prices would hurt the kingdom's fiscal position. "They have been working on scenarios...

The scariest ride at Six Flags might be its debt. Its management needs to renegotiate $287.5 million in debt due next summer. "The debt is definitely weighing on the stock," said Bill Thomas, Six Flags Inc.'s director of corporate finance. Six Flags is trading at 66 cents a share, down from $5.23 two years ago. Aventine Renewable Energy Inc. is in a jam too. The Pekin, Ill.-based company "may not have sufficient funds to complete the construction" of two ethanol plants, debt rating agency...

Emma Bell didn't know why the CTA bus ferrying her and her mother, Erin, to a friend's birthday party in Garfield Park was later than usual, but she could certainly articulate her "doomsday" scenario. "I hope we don't miss cake time," Emma, 6, said as they waited about 20 minutes for the No. 77 Belmont bus on Sunday, longer than what Erin Bell said was normal. Emma's mother said she, like many CTA riders, had heard there would be cutbacks in service and staff layoffs, but...

Venturing into the world of original event mini-series, A&E is fast-tracking "Blackout," a four-hour mini-series inspired by the blackout that hit the Eastern part of the United States and Canada last summer. The power outage last August left more than 50 million people without electricity, but A&E is planning a large-scale picture that posits an even larger blackout, one that rolls from coast-to-coast. The doomsday scenario will be drafted in consultation with experts on the U.S. power grid.

As many of you might be aware, like it or not, we are all on the clock. According to various experts, the world as we know it is supposed to end in 2012. Inasmuch as 2012 is an Olympic year -- London will be host to those Summer Games and bearing the attendant debt -- you could say the parade following that track meet will redefine the meaning of Closing Ceremonies. This doomsday scenario in part is based on the ancient Mayan civilization that...

My vote for the best political cartoon of the year is Mike Peters' "Doomsday Clock" cartoon, which the Tribune printed just in time for the transition between standard time and daylight-saving time (Editorial page, March 10). This cartoon shows President Bush standing in front of the famous Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, on which midnight is symbolic of destruction by nuclear war, and the number of minutes until midnight is a measure of the degree of nuclear threat.

The scariest ride at Six Flags might be its debt. Its management needs to renegotiate $287.5 million in debt due next summer. "The debt is definitely weighing on the stock," said Bill Thomas, Six Flags Inc.'s director of corporate finance. Six Flags is trading at 66 cents a share, down from $5.23 two years ago. Aventine Renewable Energy Inc. is in a jam too. The Pekin, Ill.-based company "may not have sufficient funds to complete the construction" of two ethanol plants, debt rating agency...

Doomsday scenarios I find it hilarious, and even a little scary, that so many liberals demand government-run universal health care. The city of Chicago cannot run a seven-line "L" train system without massive financial mismanagement, overpaid employees, dirty stations and poor customer service. Once again the CTA's head honchos are warning of a doomsday scenario of service cuts, layoffs and increased fares unless more state subsidies and tax hikes are given to bail out the CTA. One day citizens in this...

Doomsday scenarios I find it hilarious, and even a little scary, that so many liberals demand government-run universal health care. The city of Chicago cannot run a seven-line "L" train system without massive financial mismanagement, overpaid employees, dirty stations and poor customer service. Once again the CTA's head honchos are warning of a doomsday scenario of service cuts, layoffs and increased fares unless more state subsidies and tax hikes are given to bail out the CTA. One day citizens in this...

The pressure is off the CTA, Metra and Pace and back on the legislature now that the Regional Transportation Authority Board has voted to accept a short-term funding plan to forestall service cuts and fare hikes, Gov. Blagojevich said Friday. At a news conference Friday morning in front of the Lake Street "L" station at the Thompson Center, Blagojevich expressed gratitude that RTA directors had accepted his offer of millions of dollars in stop-gap funding and said the plan is a better alternative than...

CTA officials said Wednesday that a new round of service cuts and fare hikes being prepared for January would make the "doomsday" scenario set for Nov. 4 seem relatively minor. The warning to transit riders broke a prolonged silence by Chicago Transit Authority officials over diverging funding plans in the legislature -- one tied to an expansion of casino gambling, the other to increased sales taxes -- to help save Chicago-area mass transit. CTA board chairwoman Carole Brown...

Nancy Goldstone at age 27 was the head trader for currency options at one of the largest financial institutions in the country. Several years later, she left Wall Street to write. Her newest book, a novel, is "Bad Business" (Farber and Farber). Q: Do you ever miss the action of Wall Street? A: Occasionally. It took me a long time to get over it. When I first left, I had a machine installed in my house that tells you what the markets are doing all the time....

The pressure is off the CTA, Metra and Pace and back on the legislature now that the Regional Transportation Authority Board has voted to accept a short-term funding plan to forestall service cuts and fare hikes, Gov. Blagojevich said Friday. At a news conference Friday morning in front of the Lake Street "L" station at the Thompson Center, Blagojevich expressed gratitude that RTA directors had accepted his offer of millions of dollars in stop-gap funding and said the plan is a better alternative than...

Emma Bell didn't know why the CTA bus ferrying her and her mother, Erin, to a friend's birthday party in Garfield Park was later than usual, but she could certainly articulate her "doomsday" scenario. "I hope we don't miss cake time," Emma, 6, said as they waited about 20 minutes for the No. 77 Belmont bus on Sunday, longer than what Erin Bell said was normal. Emma's mother said she, like many CTA riders, had heard there would be cutbacks in service and staff layoffs, but...

'SUNSHINE' . 1/2 "Sunshine" pulls a stern, gripping variation on the old David Letterman joke, the one about President Bush responding to a heat wave by ordering an attack on the sun. Director Danny Boyle, whose feature film career got off to a zippy start with "Shallow Grave" and "Trainspotting" and the zombie thriller "28 Days Later," here turns to that oddly neglected star in the science-fiction galaxy, our sun, which according to screenwriter Alex...

As the clock ticks toward an upcoming $92 million school referendum proposal for voters in Barrington Unit District 220, the question arises: Will there be enough growth in Barrington to make the tax bite less painful? A new anti-referendum group, Citizens For Education/Against Overspending, has emerged to force the question. And earlier this week, the school board's finance chairman grilled school officials and sent them back to do their homework on projected income figures.

My vote for the best political cartoon of the year is Mike Peters' "Doomsday Clock" cartoon, which the Tribune printed just in time for the transition between standard time and daylight-saving time (Editorial page, March 10). This cartoon shows President Bush standing in front of the famous Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, on which midnight is symbolic of destruction by nuclear war, and the number of minutes until midnight is a measure of the degree of nuclear threat.